InDesign Shorts: Tip #2 – Importing Multiple Pages of a PDF

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I don’t know about you, but most of my proposals have a whole slew of forms and attachments that need to be completed. These are usually multi-page PDFs that I drop into InDesign and fill out in my master proposal document so that I can keep everything together and ensure I don’t miss anything. Once upon a time, I used to break the PDFs into individual pages and drop them in that way, because I didn’t know any better. Now I do know better, and I wish I could go back in time and save myself precious minutes (hours, even) by sharing the quick-solution to adding multiple PDF pages into an InDesign document all at once.

Open your InDesign document and add the number of blank pages you’ll need to fill with PDF pages. Then use the ‘Place’ shortcut (CTRL+D) to open a new window. Navigate to the file you want to import to InDesign, highlight it, and then click the ‘show import options’ button before importing the document.

You’ll return to InDesign, and should see a new dialogue box asking how you want to import your document. You can choose to select the first page, the currently displayed page (which you can change using the navigation arrows beneath the thumbnail), or you can select a custom range of pages to add. To place the entire document, use the custom range (1-XX whatever number you document goes to) and click okay. Then drop one PDF page on each blank page of your InDesign document.